Protecting Hardware on Unstable Power Sources?

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @10:10AM from the filters-conditioners-and-UPSes dept.

psuedo_samurai asks: "Later this year, I will be returning for a visit to a small 3rd world country in Africa. I was lucky enough to travel to the country before, and the last time that I went I was able to bring four fully functional computers that I donated to a local high school, to provide a small computer network for teaching purposes. I had loaded Red Hat Linux with Open Office and a multitude of free goodies onto the systems and everything was working well. The equipment I brought back with me survived for about 12 months, but eventually fell victim to power surges, brownouts, blackouts, and so forth. On my return, I will be better prepared and am planning on setting up 8 computers, this time around. However, I am still stuck on how to best provide either a battery backup (aside from lugging UPS's along with me) with automatic shutdown and/or AVR on the cheap. Does anyone have any good references, experience, or suggestions on how to over come the challenge of running a computer network in a country where the power fluctuates wildly and multiple outages in week are not unusual occurrences?"

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File server and semi-thin clients by isj · 2005-03-30 11:30 · Score: 4, Insightful

Install a file server that is protected with an UPS. Configure automatic shutdown of it.
Put the client PCs behind a surge protector (but not on an UPS). Make them boot from the file server drives.

That way the storage/filesystem is reasonably protected and is not smashed everytime there is a brownout. And you don't have to spend the money for a large UPS for the client PCs.